


write the poem and make it disappear

by allthelight



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: A 'what if', Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23564284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthelight/pseuds/allthelight
Summary: "There’s a sudden desire within her to lean down and gently touch Lyra’s face, and she finds she’s already doing so before she’s even fully aware. She half expects the baby to cry but she doesn’t and instead keeps looking up at her mother, not making a sound."Maybe she keeps the baby. Marisa gets to know her daughter. AU.
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter, Lyra Belacqua & Marisa Coulter
Comments: 20
Kudos: 105





	write the poem and make it disappear

**Author's Note:**

> hello! I hope you're all keeping safe and well in this strange world we find ourselves in. Here's something that came from some part of my brain and I hope it entertains you. I hope I've gotten the characterisation right and it's not too ooc but you can judge that!
> 
> The title and words are from 'Backwards' by Warsan Shire.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

_"I'll rewrite this whole life and this time there'll be so much_ _love_

_you won't be able to see beyond it."_

The cries will just not stop.

Marisa tries to tune it out at first. She rubs at her temples and focuses on the paperwork in front of her, rearranging the calculations until they tell her what she wants to know. It works for all of ten minutes. It’s as if the child knows, and in response to the continued lack of attention, her cries become higher and louder, a wail of anger more than anything else.

“What are they doing?” Marisa seethes, very close to breaking her pencil in half. “Just letting her cry?”

No work can be done with this racket, and she pushes her chair back from her desk with the intent of finding out what all the fuss is about. The nanny surely should have done something about it by now; that is, after all, what she’s paid an exorbitant amount of money to do.

“Where is that woman?” She directs the question to nobody, but the monkey has hopped up onto the desk, looking at her curiously. He could very well know the answer and just not tell her. She would not put it past him.

Marisa opens the heavy door to the hallway, and loudly strides all the way down to the door at the end, the golden light of the nursery shining through. Inside, Lyra grips at the bars of her cradle, face red and mournful. Marisa barely looks at her, and instead presses the bell to summon a maid.

“Where is the nanny?” Marisa demands when the girl appears, who instantly looks as though she wishes to be anywhere else.

“It’s her evening off, ma’am.”

How could she have forgotten that? The headache building behind her eyes only intensifies. “And what about the nursery maid? Is it her evening off, as well?”

The girl begins to shake. “No, ma’am. She’s sick, and you didn’t want her ‘round in case she spread it. Ma’am.”

That’s right, she had said that, but she doesn’t like the implication that she has forgotten what orders she has given, that she is not in control of her household. Lyra, uncaring of staffing issues, continues to cry.

“I could deal with her, ma’am,” the girl says, but she sounds terrified. “If you want me to.”

Resisting an urge to rub her temples, and annoyed by the girl’s limpness, she snaps, “No. I do not. Just go, and shut the door behind you.”

The girl scampers out and shuts the door behind her with a shaky click, leaving Marisa and Lyra alone. Lyra has stopped crying, sensing something in the atmosphere, and she regards her mother warily, the same way Marisa regards her.

“Well, this is different, isn’t it?”

Marisa rarely deals with Lyra herself, preferring to leave her to the nanny or the nursemaid or whichever other servant she sends to deal with her. The baby is an annoyance, a distraction from the work which truly matters, and as such Marisa has never made much of an effort to try and act as though she is otherwise. She can go days, once a whole week, without ever laying eyes on the child and so far it has been an arrangement that has suited them both just fine.

There is another reason Marisa cannot bear to look at her for long, though it has less to do with her work and more about the uncanny resemblance between the child and the man who used to make her feel as though the entire universe was theirs for the taking.

She walks over to the baby, looking down at her in her cradle in a way that she is not apt to do. Lyra and her kitten daemon look up wide-eyed, as though they are waiting to see what happens next.

“You look like him, you know,” Marisa muses gently, no fear of being overheard. The other servants will all be downstairs cowering, and her husband is away on some tour of northern Anglia, not slated to return until next Monday at the latest.

Lyra makes a gurgle and Pantalaimon turns into a tiny bat. It stirs something long-forgotten in Marisa, who remembers when her own used to be able to do that, when she used to be something different than who she is now. A minister’s wife with a bastard child to one of the most powerful lords in the country. Nobody would believe it if it weren’t true.

“It’s not in the most obvious way,” she continues, hands now holding on to the sides of the cradle. “Which is all the better for you. That’s not to say it’s subtle. If you knew what you were looking for, you would see it as clear as day.”

She wonders if Asriel saw it when he came to visit Lyra when she was a week old. They had been alone then, he three of them in a room, as close to a family as they would ever get. She hadn’t thought to tell anybody about the birth. Edward had left a few days before the event knowing full well how heavily pregnant she was, and though she had never expected much from him, she had somehow expected better. And Asriel… well it hardly mattered, did it? The baby looked innocuous enough to be Marisa and Edward’s child, they would not have to enact on a plan they had barely made. It wouldn’t be his child and, Marisa had reasoned, there was no point in just upsetting him.

He had been upset though, when he had found out, strolling through the door of the house as if it were their own. Holding Lyra in his arms, looking down at her with an expression Marisa couldn’t name, he had been angrier in a quiet way that had made it all the more powerful.

“I deserved to be told,” he had said, voice frighteningly low. “This is my daughter, and I deserved to know that she had arrived.”

“What does it matter?” She had scoffed, then lowered the volume so as not to upset the baby, who at that point was only known as such. “It’s not like you could do anything.”

“That isn’t the point,” he had said, bending down slightly to let Stelmaria see her and that tiny daemon. “This is my daughter, too.”

She had wondered if he really cared, or whether he was just protesting because he could, and playing the moral high ground to make her feel terrible. “Would you have taken her? If she had looked too much like you?” Her tone was dismissive, already taking the negative.

He had looked at her for a long moment, before looking back down at the baby. “Like you said, it doesn’t matter now.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

The baby had gurgled and the side of Asriel’s mouth had twitched slightly. “That was my answer.”

Marisa has seen him a few times since then. Edward is gone and she is always here, trying to return to her own work whilst at the same time not trusting any nanny in the house alone with the baby for very long. Things are not the same as they were before Lyra, though, and Marisa doubts they ever will be. It feels as though they have both grown, and their affair becomes depressingly second to the drudgery that is reality.

She misses him. Not that she would ever admit it.

There’s a sudden desire within her to lean down and gently touch Lyra’s face, and she finds she’s already doing so before she’s even fully aware. She half expects the baby to cry but she doesn’t and instead keeps looking up at her mother, not making a sound.

The skin is soft beneath Marisa’s fingertips, and so warm. So alive. It’s been six months and Lyra has yet to become fully real to her. Mostly she’s just a noise, or a question someone asks the rare times Marisa ventures into the outside world. Even Edward and her rarely speak of the child, though some nights she has gone to bed and seen him standing over the cradle, looking down as if puzzled, as though he is troubled by something he doesn’t understand.

Perhaps he sees what Marisa sees, that Asriel-like quality that Lyra has, that effect that emanates from her. Only Marisa can see it, and only because she knows exactly what she’s looking for. Thank God Edward doesn’t know what to make of it. With his tempers, the consequences don’t even bear thinking about.

“You’re quite the thing,” Marisa hums, and Lyra gives her a gummy, almost-smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it before.”

Why would she? She hasn’t properly looked at her daughter ever since she was born. It hurts too much. It tears something deep down and makes her feel as though there will be nothing left of the woman she once was, the woman she worked so hard to be.

Then there’s another urge, and this one she doesn’t even try to resist. Stiff and unpractised, she reaches down and scoops up Lyra, bringing her into her arms. She’s heavier than she was expecting, and it’s a slightly awkward affair to get her arranged comfortably but the baby never complains. Her eyes never leave her mother’s, and Marisa can feel the monkey eyeing her from the side, wondering at exactly what’s going on, and yet not wanting to question it for fear of ruining it.

“There we are. There was no need to fuss. I expect you just wanted some attention, didn’t you?”

Lyra gurgles the affirmative.

“You’re alright now. I’m-” she breaks off for a moment, before continuing anyway. “I’m here now, Lyra. I’m here.”

Even her name was not Marisa’s choice. There’s nothing about Lyra that was Marisa’s choice. She never wanted to be a mother, and frankly she still doesn’t, but there’s something about her baby that makes it impossible to let go.

“You look like me, too,” she says, as though it’s a secret. It’s something she’s hardly dared to admit, and it’s something nobody dares comment on, but there is very much of Marisa in this baby. Thirty minutes ago, this would have been a terrible thing. Now there’s something that could be pride in her voice.

“I often worried about what you would look like. I didn’t care if you looked like me or not, but if you’d looked like _him_ … there might have been problems. We should have thought about it more – the plan we had was never very steady. I suppose we should have thought about a lot of things more.”

They should have but they didn’t, because although they calculated every move they ever made, they never did when it came to each other. When they were together it felt as if they were masters of the universe, and nobody mattered except the two of them. It was the most alive she’s ever felt. It’s impossible not to get drunk off him, and maybe this is the way it is with their daughter. Maybe this is why, when Marisa looks down and sees that curious face, she realises, quite suddenly, that she would kill for it and maybe even die for it in equal measure.

Maybe she would even say she loves it.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how to be a mother,” she says softly, bouncing Lyra gently in her arms. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good at it even if I tried. I will try, however. For you.”

It’s feels as though something is unlocking in her chest, something is expanding and growing warm and it’s dizzying yet wonderful at the same time. She’s only felt something like it once before, and never as utterly as she does now.

Then something fiercer grips her, and in turn she holds Lyra tighter to her chest. If they could become one again, if she could tuck her back inside her chest and keep her safe then she would. Even existing is incredibly dangerous for Lyra, and Marisa will not even allow herself to think of how it all could have gone.

“Nobody will ever harm you, Lyra.” She speaks in hushed tones, lips against her daughter’s forehead. “Nothing and nobody shall ever harm you, not while I’m here.”

For her daughter is really quite beautiful, and Marisa wonders how she could have never seen it until now. A whole person that she has made, grown inside her and given out into the world, and is now hers. All hers. A wonderful, marvellous thing.

There was a love there in the beginning, she is sure of it now. Perhaps no larger than a mustard seed in comparison to everything else but there all the same. Now, though, it has grown tremendously from nowhere, sneaking in like a thief in the night, and it has overtaken her completely. A few minutes with the baby, of looking into her face, and she has stolen her heart, if there were such a thing to steal.

She can do it all. She’s Marisa Coulter after all, and isn’t daunted by something as trivial as hard work. She can continue her work into Dust and she can continue to use Edward’s connections to get her more information and she can be a mother to Lyra. She can probably continue to see Asriel, also, provided she’s more discreet than usual. Oh yes, she can manage it. Marisa smiles brightly as plans form together in her head.

“You’ll be somebody extraordinary,” she says to her daughter, watching the way Lyra’s eyes light up as she talks to her. The baby looks somewhat content now, as opposed to wary. “I’ll make sure of it.”

For it’s simple now, what she must do. She must make sure her daughter becomes the best she can ever be, better than either of her parents. The work she’s doing is important and cannot be forgotten – it is, after all, to rid the world of the sin which so nearly toppled her – but Lyra is important, too. Left to the devices of the nanny and the tutors who knows what would happen? No, she needs a mother’s guidance, and Marisa is determined not to let her down.

“We’ll show them all, Lyra. Those who doubt us and push us down and whisper behind our backs about how unsuited we are. We’ll make them see that they should never have underestimated us.”

Marisa bounces her daughter gently in her arms, enjoying the solid weight and the feeling of warmth pressed against her chest. Motherhood will never naturally become her but she’s alright with that. Marisa Coulter is a master at finding her way, no matter what.

Her heart swells with love and pride and satisfaction and she cannot help but beam down at Lyra. She stands there for a length of time, completely enamoured by her daughter, never wanting to let her go again.

Eventually there’s a knock at the door and when bidden to, the maid from before clears her voice and says, “Ma’am?”

“What?” Marisa snaps, never taking her eyes from the baby, but knowing that the girl must stand there as pathetic as before. “Go on then. Spit it out.”

“The nanny is back, ma’am. Should I tell her to come up?”

Her hands curl around Lyra instinctively, but the smile never leaves her face.

“No,” she says softer and sweeter, suddenly aware that the harsh tone has upset Lyra and she doesn’t want to do that. She shakes her head. “We won’t be needing her.”

“Ma’am?” The girl repeats, obviously unsure.

“I said what I said,” Marisa says, though her tone is still sweet and soft for Lyra’s benefit. “We don’t need her.” She keeps rocking the baby. “We’re absolutely fine.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! please feel free to leave kudos/feedback but this is a crazy time so even just making it to the end of this is greatly appreciated. I hope you're okay!


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